1. Field of the Invention
Implementations described herein relate generally to advertising and, more particularly, to syndicated advertising that includes trackable ad content.
2. Description of Related Art
The World Wide Web (“web”) contains a vast amount of information. Locating a desired portion of the information, however, can be challenging. This problem is compounded because the amount of information on the web and the number of new users inexperienced at web searching are growing rapidly.
Search engines attempt to return hyperlinks to web pages in which a user is interested. Generally, search engines base their determination of the user's interest on search terms (called a search query) entered by the user. The goal of the search engine is to provide links to high quality, relevant results (e.g., web pages) to the user based on the search query. Typically, the search engine accomplishes this by matching the terms in the search query to a corpus of pre-stored web pages. Web pages that contain the user's search terms are “hits” and are returned to the user as links. Each “hit” may be ranked by the search engine based on various factors, such as, for example, the relevance of the “hit” to the search query.
Existing search engines (e.g., GOOGLE Web search) may also include on-line advertising functionality that may advertise various services and/or products in conjunction with providing search results to users. Such advertisements may be presented to users accessing search results provided by the search engine. An advertisement may include a “creative,” which includes text, graphics and/or images associated with the advertised service and/or product. The advertisement may further include a link to an ad “landing document” which contains further details about the advertised service(s) and/or product(s). When a particular creative appears to be of interest to a user, the user may select (or click) the creative, and the associated link causes a user's web browser to visit the “landing document” associated with the creative and link. This selection of an advertising creative and associated link by a user is referred to hereinafter as a “click.” The link to the ad landing document contained in the advertisement may include a plain text uniform resource locator (URL).
Existing search engines (e.g., GOOGLE Web Search), to provide advertisements along with search results, may syndicate advertisements from numerous advertisers. The numerous syndicated advertisements may be provided to users using the search engine, or may be provided to publishers that may publish the syndicated advertisements along with the publishers' own hosted content.